Interlinking showy traits: co‐engineering of scent and colour biosynthesis in flowers

Abstract

SummaryThe phenylpropanoid pathway gives rise to metabolites that determine floral colour and fragrance. These metabolites are one of the main means used by plants to attract pollinators, thereby ensuring plant survival. A lack of knowledge about factors regulating scent production has prevented the successful enhancement of volatile phenylpropanoid production in flowers. In this study, the Production of Anthocyanin Pigment1 ( Pap1 ) Myb transcription factor from Arabidopsis thaliana , known to regulate the production of non-volatile phenylpropanoids, including anthocyanins, was stably introduced into The use of a regulatory factor that activates scent production creates a new biotechnological strategy for the metabolic architecture of fragrance, leading to the creation of novel genetic variability for breeding purposes.

Color and Scent: How Single Genes Influence Pollinator Attraction

“…In contrast, the introduction of the Arabidopsis R2R3-MYB transcription factor PRODUCTION OF ANTHOCYANIN PIGMENT 1 (PAP1; a member of the R2R3-MYB subfamily 6) into P. hybrida enhanced both branches of the phenylpropanoid pathway, leading to the production of color and scent. This argues against metabolic competition but supports the notion that PAP1 has a pleiotropic effect on both pathways (Zvi et al 2006(Zvi et al , 2008. Similarly, 35S:PAP1 transgenic Rosa hybrida showed increased pigmentation as well as eugenol accumulation (Zvi et al 2012).…”

Genetic modification in floriculture

“…Expression of these genes can have effects on flower colour (Yamagishi et al 2010), fragrance (Zvi et al 2008) and disease resistance (Pandy and Somssich 2009). Addition of transcription factors such as MADS box genes may be used to change the colour of vegetative plant parts of floricultural species (Han et al 2009) or to change time to flowering (Shulga et al 2009) and flower form (Thiruvengadam and Yang 2009).…”

“…Floral scent is due to volatiles that are primarily derivatives of terpenoids, phenylpropanoids/benzenoids or fatty acids (Pichersky and Dudareva 2007;Zvi et al 2008). The biochemical pathways involved in the production of plant volatiles are complex (van Schie et al 2006;Yu and Utsumi 2009) but some genes encoding enzymes of the pathways have been isolated and characterised Colquhoun et al 2010;Guterman et al 2006;Dudareva and Pichersky 2008).…”

“…Metabolic engineering of floral scent via overexpression of heterologous structural or regulatory genes or by down-regulation of existing pathways has been used to elucidate biochemical pathways (Pichersky and Dudareva 2007; Dudareva and Pichersky 2008;Colquhoun et al 2010;Guterman et al 2006;Zvi et al 2008). However, we are unaware of any reports where flower fragrance has been restored or manipulated to commercially significant levels.…”

A comparison of metabolite extraction strategies for 1H‐NMR‐based metabolic profiling using mature leaf tissue from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana

“…Metabolic profiling, which aims to identify and quantify specific metabolites, [1,2] often focuses on a single class of compounds with the desire to test a hypothesis. Metabolomics, also called metabonomics, is a closely related field that aims for the interrogation of all metabolites present in an organism lending the possibility of generating new hypotheses.…”